actix-website/content/docs/whatis.md

---
title: What is Actix
menu: docs_intro
weight: 100
---

# Actix is an Ecosystem of Crates

Long ago, `actix-web` was built on top of `actix`, a powerful and fast actor system.
Now, `actix-web` is largely unrelated to the actor framework and is built using a different system.
Though `actix` is still maintained, its usefulness as a general tool is diminishing as the
futures and async/await ecosystem matures. At this time, the use of `actix` is only required for
WebSocket endpoints.

We call `actix-web` a powerful and pragmatic framework. For all intents and purposes it's a
micro-framework with a few twists. If you are already a Rust programmer you will probably find
yourself at home quickly, but even if you are coming from another programming language you should
find `actix-web` easy to pick up.

<!-- TODO -->
<!-- actix-extras -->

An application developed with `actix-web` will expose an HTTP server contained within a native
executable. You can either put this behind another HTTP server like nginx or serve it up as-is. Even
in the complete absence of another HTTP server `actix-web` is powerful enough to provide HTTP/1 and
HTTP/2 support as well as TLS (HTTPS). This makes it useful for building small services ready for
production.

Most importantly: `actix-web` runs on Rust {{< rust-version "actix-web" >}} or later and it works
with stable releases.

<!-- TODO -->
<!-- which is built upon the fantastic [Tokio][tokio] asynchronous I/O system -->

<!-- LINKS -->

[tokio]: https://tokio.rs